This is not a chicken, this is the first bird to be domesticated by humans

Geese may be the oldest domesticated poultry in world history, with evidence from China suggesting that this bird species may have existed among humans thousands of years ago. A new finding was published Monday in the international academic journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Ancient goose bones collected from a 7,000-year-old rice-growing village in eastern China's Zhejiang province show that domestication dates back to the 5th millennium BC during the time, the researchers say. new stone age.

Goose breeding.

'What's interesting is that the oldest (domesticated bird) is not a chicken, but a geese," said Masaki Eda, an associate professor at Hokkaido University in Japan and lead author of the study. He also said that the discovery overturns the long-held belief that chickens are the earliest poultry in the world.

In contrast to chickens - the most commonly farmed poultry species in China and other parts of the globe - geese are now a minor poultry species. Although China dominates the global production of goose meat, the animal is not a top food source on the Chinese table, aside from a few popular dishes like roast goose.

The above evidence also supports research findings found in the Tianluoshan area of ​​Zhejiang province, which contains the remains of a rice-growing village belonging to the ancient Hemudu Culture. The researchers discovered that some of the skeletons studied belonged to locally bred geese, whose diet may have included village rice - as distinct from migratory geese - suggesting signs of early domestication.

Based on the incision and crafting marks on the bones, the researchers suggest that locally raised geese provided the raw materials for tools and supplementary food for humans at the time. Professor Eda said that geese were not the main source of meat even at the time, and that venison and duck were more common on the table.

With evidence showing a long history of domestication of geese going back to the Neolithic period, the researchers suggest that the geese bred locally at Tianluoshan may be the ancestors of today's European domestic geese.

Meanwhile, the researchers also note that although some studies have traced the initial domestication of chickens to as early as the 9th millennium BC, the reliability of this evidence remains uncertain. 'question'. According to Eda, a more widely accepted conclusion has been that the earliest domestication of chickens appeared more than 2,000 years ago in India.